Protecting Intellectual Property for Software

For anyone that hasn’t been paying attention, a digital revolution has been occurring since the 1980s. The software industry is growing exponentially. Disrupting and transforming almost every industry from healthcare to education, and blurring the lines between the physical and the digital along the way. As a developer or vendor of software, you want your business to be rewarded for the time and effort you have expended in your contribution to technology. But what are intellectual property rights? How do they relate to software? And how do you protect software intellectual property?

What is IP Protection For Software and How Does it apply to Software Technology?

Intellectual property refers to any ‘creation of the mind’, and in general we tend to think of this as being literary or artistic works. However, since the 1970s, intellectual property has also included the legal protection of computer programmes - so that developers can earn recognition and gain financial benefit from the software applications that they create.

To further the protection of the intellectual property rights of artists, writers and designers, the Berne Convention was held in 1886. The Berne Convention states that rather than requiring any kind of formal application or registration, copyright exists on all works, from the moment they are ‘fixed’. The Berne Convention also states that except for photographic and cinematographic work, copyright protection automatically lasts for the life of the author, plus 50 years.

Iteration after iteration, vigorous testing and development and ‘ta-dah’ - a software creation is finished. And now, thanks to the Berne Convention, regardless of whether software was developed from scratch or built upon the source code of another application, the intellectual property in the finished work is automatically protected by copyright law. However, beware; the legalese of IP Protection is not a Software IP protection strategy.

Copyright infringement includes direct and indirect copying, as well as unauthorised translation of software code into different programming languages. The law exists to protect software applications from intellectual property theft. Anyone that downloads or runs a software without permission is infringing on the exclusive rights of the copyright owner and could be liable for any damages or subject to a statutory fine. However the legislation itself can only be used to enforce intellectual property rights - it doesn’t track software usage and can’t alert the copyright owner to an infringement of their work.

IP Protection for Software Apps

There are different forms of IP Protection, each affording different levels of protection. The worst IP protection strategies for computer software involve keeping a record of software sales and manually deploying software keys. Usually born out of necessity and / or not having the resources to build an automated solution in-house, this method relies on tracking software sales and deploying some sort of ‘key’ in order for software to run.

Reconciling license keys against a database of authorised users and shipping physical hardware, such as license dongles, is a time-consuming and expensive process. And the pay-off isn’t that great. Aside from the additional admin costs, even with perpetual licensing or hardware-based IDs, there's no way of reliably knowing where and how software is being used. Hardware can be cloned and license dongles can easily be passed from one user to another - and what about customers that want consumption-based, subscription or other usage models?

Read our guide to learn more about Licensing as a Service.

Best IP Protection Software

The first step to creating a robust Software IP protection strategy is to let go of outdated systems. For software providers, the best IP protection software not only creates a great customer experience when onboarding new customers, the inherent operational efficiency aligns with the objectives of every successful software company.

In a highly competitive, global digital market, it is no longer financially viable to expect customers to endure cumbersome processes to gain access to a software programme. In today's modern digital world, end-consumers are also not just aware of metered usage, free trials and ‘pay as you go’ pricing, they have come to expect these options. Software vendors need to offer several different software usage models - maybe even to the same customer - and they also need to be able to reliably revoke access rights as the entitlements of their customer-base evolves.